Times Literary Supplement (January 24, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Rich Are Always With Us’ – Ferdinand Mount on taming the plutocrats; Empire’s balance sheet; Who is Charles III?; Silvia Townsend Warner’s revival and ChatGPT goes to college…
The importance of Homer by Joshua T. Katz Galaxy brains by Gary Saul Morson The Thames: river of destinies by Jeremy Black “Breakfast Special”: a new story by Woody Allen
New poems by Nicholas Friedman, Jessica Hornik & Michael Spence
London Review of Books (LRB) – January 17, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Living With Keats’ – A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph; Congress vs Harvard; The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution, and more…
Looking back to September 1820, when things had gone badly wrong but not yet so grotesquely as to be visibly beyond repair, we can see how few and how poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused.
Times Literary Supplement (January 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Power Failure’ – The retreat from net zero; Canon wars; The end of literary criticism; Empires imprint on the Middle East; Harvard and plagarism….
Times Literary Supplement (January 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Have a good trip’ – On the uses of psychedelic drugs; Hisham Matar’s novel of London exile; A West Bank tragedy; Puzzled by crosswords; French Band Aid, and more…
I rode west with a childhood friend who was driving to a job in California. We passed through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and still there was no sign of the Commander. My friend placed a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans on the console between us, jumble of rich dark gems, glittering like they were wet. I crunched them in my teeth without thinking. Sometimes I drove and let her sleep. When clouds clotted the sun her hair still glowed, some mix of orange and yellow and pink. Toast, or the honey for it, or the cinnamon.
After we spent a day and a night in a certain desert town, I told my friend to go on without me. I’d stay. The town was bordered by empty hills and endless sky: room to disappear. I found an unopened pack of Juicy Fruit gum on the sidewalk, which I took for a sign.
Times Literary Supplement (January 3, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Lady Vanishes’ – Muireann Maguire on a revival of classic crime fiction; What next for Julian Assange; David Hockney’s drawings; Dreaming up 007; The science of belonging and more…
Times Literary Supplement (December 20, 2023): The latest issue features ‘A nice little earner’ – On Dicken’s Christmas Carol; Jane Austen’s Truth Universally Acknowledged; Between God and Jingle Bells; and ‘Revoltingly Cute’…
Times Literary Supplement (December 13, 2023): The latest issue features ‘Innocent bystanders? – Collaboration with the Third Reich; The contaminated blood scandal; Gertrude Stein and Picasso, Hamlet’s play; AI Journalism and Clarice Lispector calls…